Arts Writers is a new collaborative initiative between Glasgow International, Glasgow School of Art and The List, which sees students from the Glasgow School of Art's Master of Letters in Art Writing programme write features and reviews about works at this year's Glasgow International. The writers and critics will receive mentorship and publication via The List. The first work to be published in this series is Donald Butler's review of Jenkin van Zyl's work Machines of Love.

There's something about dark rooms which compel us to act out our most extreme behaviours. Be it in the cinema, the bath house or the club, pitch black anonymity provides the freedom to act outside of social norms. The suspense of not knowing what exactly we might find around the corner, or how we will react to what's hiding, is extremely magnetic. Jenkin van Zyl has taken the T4 space at Tramway and realised a dungeon-like installation that amps up that feeling of suspense, creating an unsettling yet engrossing environment to experience their film Machines of Love.

Commissioned as part of the director's programme for Glasgow International, which this year is centred around the theme of 'Attention', van Zyl's film and installation draws heavily on the tropes of horror, cinema and TV. The film at the heart of the work follows a cast of six demonic creatures that could have easily been plucked from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Across the 40-minute film these creatures participate in a number of ritualistic acts of role play and gambling, although the purpose of their actions is never made entirely clear.

Set in a casino constructed from aircraft bodies which have been buried underneath a Viking village, the film continually builds on the tensions of animalistic human behaviour colliding with technologies, creating the effect of skimming through a manic Instagram story. Some of the most compelling sequences are filmed using GoPros or drones to create distorted hallucinogenic scenes. Characters pace around sets smeared with white paint or are tracked as they walk along volcanic beaches in Iceland, and van Zyl never attempts to hide the unique qualities of filming with these devices.

Although there is no dialogue to discern a definitive narrative in the work, phrases mimicking airport notice boards punctuate the film, giving hints as to what is unfolding. Avatars of each character with loading graphics underneath is accompanied by the words 'fantasies are labour intensive'; a drone shot of dramatic mountains cuts to the mission statement, 'in the wreckage of our offices we take fantasy seriously'. As we all emerge from extended periods of lockdown, where many of us have filled our time binging TV shows, films or video games, Machines of Love takes the literal excesses of these entertainment industries to create a uniquely contemporary horror flick centred around the continual longing for increasingly extreme fantasies and experiences.

The real horror in this work is perhaps understood only towards the end of the film, where the audience is directly addressed to remind us that 'your body didn't belong to you outside either'. Statements around the labour, production and service of the ritualistic acts displayed in the film hint at a social sphere completely controlled by an unknown agent or corporation, a resonance with our current socio-political climate that is particularly unnerving. It is the ambitious scale of Machines of Love that contains both its draw and its downfall, where a certain critical focus is lost in the scale of its production. There are many threads brought up in the work that never quite seem to go anywhere.

Jenkin van Zyl: Machines of Love is available to view at Tramway until Sunday 27 June.